The Libraries of Great Men: Frederick Douglass

Jeremy Anderberg

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The Libraries of Great Men: Frederick Douglass

Welcome back to our series on the libraries of great men. The eminent men of history were often voracious readers and their own philosophy represents a distillation of all the great works they fed into their minds. This series seeks to trace the stream of their thinking back to the source. For, as David Leach, a now retired business executive put it: “Don’t follow your mentors; follow your mentors’ mentors.”

Frederick Douglass was born into slavery. Before him, many white men didn’t think it was possible for a black man to have any intellectual rigor; for a black man to be able to think for himself in an intelligent way. When Douglass was around 20, he escaped his shackles and began life anew as a free man. From that point on, he gave his full attentions to educating himself, which he believed was a necessary component of all individual achievements and the ability to create real change in the world. It was a truth he understood from his own personal, hard-fought struggle: up from slavery, he rose to become one the foremost leaders in America in the abolitionist and women’s rights movements, as well as one of the most celebrated orators and writers of his era.

None of that would have been possible without his personal library.

Douglass was taught to read around the age of 12 by Sophia Auld, the wife of one of his masters. Mrs. Auld did this in spite of a Maryland law that prohibited teaching reading skills to slaves. Mr. Hugh Auld strongly disapproved, believing that if a slave learned to read, he would become dissatisfied with his condition and would begin to desire freedom. Even a slave owner, or perhaps especially a slave owner, understood that knowledge equaled power and will. Eventually, Mrs. Auld gave in to her husband’s admonitions and resigned herself to the idea that slavery and education were incompatible. Her tutoring came to an abrupt end one day when she snatched away a newspaper Douglass was trying to read.

Undaunted, Douglass continued to hone his reading skills on his own, in secret. He read anything he could get his hands on — newspapers, political pamphlets, novels, textbooks. He even credits one particular collection, The Columbian Orator, with clarifying and defining his views on freedom and human rights.

Douglass wished to rise in the world, and he fervently believed the path of self-reliance was the only way up. It was not luck or circumstances that determined man’s success, he argued, but how hard and how consistently he worked. Nothing valuable could ever be gotten for nothing or from waiting around for others to make things happen for you. “The man who will get up will be helped up; and the man who will not get up will be allowed to stay down,” he preached. He understood that no one else could shovel knowledge into his brain; it was up to him to pry it out of as many books as he could. Whatever knowledge he secured to himself, could never be taken away by another.

Ultimately, then, for Frederick Douglass reading meant freedom.

His ability to read a text, to synthesize that information, and then let it change his thoughts and compel him to action directly led to his fight against slavery, both as an individual man seeking his own freedom, and later as a statesman, fighting for the rights of his fellow man. A single man’s desire to read and attain knowledge changed the landscape of America forever.

Throughout his life, Douglass’s library would grow, and it now serves as a great insight into his thoughts and beliefs. In reading through the list, you get an idea of how incredibly wide-read Douglass was. We see everything from classic Christian pieces, to abolitionist texts, to popular novels of the time, to history and science textbooks, and even seemingly random works on subjects like the dental arts and knitting(!).

If you don’t recognize the name of an author you see below, I encourage you to do some Googling (like I did!) in order to find out more about these works that are contained to this day in Douglass’s library. This list is a fascinating trove of knowledge that played a crucial part in the history of this nation.

Before you dig in, I’ll leave you with a quote from Douglass’s incredibly inspiring “Self-Made Men” speech, that attests to the value he put in reading. To read, and simply forget, is to have never read at all. Let the reading you do change you for the better, and let it compel you to action to make the world a better place. If you do so, you’ll make ol’ Douglass proud.

“We have all met a class of men, very remarkable for their activity, and who yet make but little headway in life; men who, in their noisy and impulsive pursuit of knowledge, never get beyond the outer bark of an idea, from a lack of patience and perseverance to dig to the core; men who begin everything and complete nothing; who see, but do not perceive; who read, but forget what they read, and are as if they had not read; who travel but go nowhere in particular, and have nothing of value to impart when they return.”

A Selection of Books from Frederick Douglass’s Personal Library

Title

Author

Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe

Alexander von Humboldt

The Count of Monte Cristo

Alexandre Dumas

The Three Musketeers

Alexandre Dumas

Poems

Alfred Lord Tennyson

A Thousand and One Nights

Henrietta Temple: A Love Story

Benjamin Disraeli

Bleak House

Charles Dickens

Cricket on the Hearth

Charles Dickens

‘Three Score Years and Ten’ Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other Parts of the West

Charlotte Van Cleve

Orations

Cicero

Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa

David Livingstone

Hesiod and Theognis

(Davies translation)

The Steam Engine Explained & Illustrated

Dionysius Lardner

History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Edward Gibbon

Journal of a Residence on a Georgian 1863 Plantation

Frances Anne Kemble

A Journey Through Texas

Frederick Law Olmsted

Mary Stuart: A Tragedy

Friedrich Schiller

An Egyptian Princess

Georg Ebers

Memorial Address on the Life of Abraham Lincoln

George Bancroft

Romola

George Eliot

The Journal of George Fox

George Fox

An Overland Journey Round the World

George Simpson

Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Harriet Jacobs

Complete Works of Henry Fielding

Henry Fielding

History of Civilization in England

Henry Thomas Buckle

Notes from Plymouth Pulpit

Henry Ward Beecher

History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America

Henry Wilson

The Study of History in American Colleges and Universities

Herbert Adams

The Iliad

Homer

The Odyssey

Homer

The American Conflict

Horace Greeley

Natural History of Enthusiasm

Isaac Taylor

Music and Some Highly Musical People

James Trotter

Napoleon: His Army and His Generals

Jean Charles Dominique De Lacretelle

The Confessions

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The Sorrows of Young Werther

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The Farm and the Fireside; Or the Romance of Agriculture.

John Blake

Works of John Greenleaf Whittier

John Greenleaf Whittier

Poetical Works of John Keats

John Keats

The Rise of the Dutch Republic

John Lothrop Motley

The Life of Rev. John Wesley

John Whitehead

Journal of John Woolman

John Woolman

The Science of Government

Joseph Alden

Reminiscences of Levi Coffin

Levi Coffin

Don Juan

Lord George Byron

Works of Lord Byron

Lord George Byron

Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth

Lucy Aikin

The Essence of Christianity

Ludwig Feuerbach

Meditations

Marcus Aurelius

A Popular Treatise on the Teeth: Containing a History of the Dental Art

Mayo Smith

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